Firstly, this is the "authorized" version of the film, not the longer one (6 minutes of extra / alternative footage; see here).

Unlike the Museum DVDs of "Journey to Prehistory" (slight improvement in PQ) and "The Fabulous World of Jules Verne" (significant improvement), clearly based on newly created transfers, the box blurb "Scanned for the first time from original film elements" does not seem to hold true for this one - to my eyes, it appears to originate from the same source as the Spanish, Polish and Italian releases, but - due to additional processing (more on that in a sec) - it actually shows less detail (observe e.g. the stripes on Baron Munchausen's costume and on the wall behind him in frame 65297). I wonder why they didn't use the comparatively recent hi-def scan the Czech TV channel 1 HD aired on November 6, 2010...? True, it'd need some colour correction, that is, assuming the Museum's DVD sports the correct colour scheme, and it should - supposedly (I may as well say "evidently" - check out the slightly more pronounced blue tinting of frame 82233 [green in ČT1's broadcast!] or the purplish cannon blast smoke in frame 100732), Universal Production Partners colour corrected these films for KZM... Or did they use AND colour correct the hi-def transfer after all? I'm confused... No, it can't be, since the geometry is different:

Edit: Scratch that (Done! ;-)), one of the UPP employees confirmed they had indeed created brand new 2K masters for all three films, but converting them to DVD format (and the consequences thereof - more on those in a sec, really) had been up to Karel Zeman Museum / their "authoring house" (a certain Tomáš Frelich, going by this article). Regarding the fact that UPP's transfer (in this particular DVD incarnation) looks rather similar to the one the Spanish, Polish and Italian releases were based on - and this, again, is my own "fabulation" - it just goes to show that both of them came from the same source and / or were colour corrected against the same reference.

Now, about the "additional processing" / conversion from 2K to D1 (720×576); not sure which order these have been done in, but it's obvious that some kind of automatic scratch & spot removal tool has been set loose here at one point, as evidenced by the all but obliterated raindrops falling from the flowers after the storm in the following example (a JavaScript animation):

Karel Zeman Museum | Track Media / Sinister Film

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RE the DVD down-conversion, and the incomprehensible decision to encode these "Academy ratio" films 16:9 enhanced, i.e. "pillar-boxing" the 1.37:1 picture inside the 1.78:1 frame - by popular demand (of my friend and fellow reviewer standa.e ;-)), let me elaborate on the claim I made in my review of "Journey to Prehistory:" To begin with, here's a "raw" frame exactly as encoded on the Museum's DVD:

As you can see, the picture is horizontally "squeezed" and flanked by thick black bars (the "pillars") on the left & right - clearly, a significant part of the limited (by today's standards) SD resolution is "lost" (well, not actually lost, but rather not taken advantage of). But does it really affect the quality / level of detail preserved on the DVD? "It sure does, Ma'am," but don't take my word for it - let me show you instead; of course, it wouldn't prove anything was I to start my experiment with the already fumbled KZM encode, and I don't have access to the original 2K master, but I do have here the next best thing - my 1080i recording of ČT1 HD's broadcast. So, let's begin, shall we? ;-) With some light technical background:

The broadcast is 1.37:1, the same as the Museum's DVD, but I also did the "exercise" with the picture slightly cropped to get a perfect 1.33:1 ratio in order to make the final comparison a little more effective (you'll see what I mean when we get there).

I use AviSynth for all my video editing; in this particular case, I used its Spline64Resize filter for downscaling from 1080i to D1, and Lanczos4Resize for upscaling the resulting frames to the display resolution of 1024×576 (16:9 enhanced) and 768×576 (4:3), respectively.

Okay, there's not much to add - these are the frames as they'd look encoded on the DVD (again, observe the thick black borders for "16:9 enhanced"):

Uncanny, isn't it? And in case of the 1.33:1 ratio, even the picture size is identical (this is what I meant ;-))! There's just the little matter of the 16:9 enhanced version lacking detail (observe e.g. the stripes on the Baron's costume and on the wall behind him)... QED

Anyway, time to wrap this up, so - the conclusion: Whatever my quibbles with this DVD are, I still do recommend it not only to Karel Zeman fans everywhere, but to anybody interested in seeing a piece of the good ol' movie magic - believe me, it's worth it!

The Fabulous Baron Munchausen, we meet again... You know, this site's been built around Baron Munchausen, that is, around the first ever release of Karel Zeman films anywhere in the world: the massive - and at the time massively expensive - Japanese collector's box, well, two of them, containing virtually everything Zeman ever made... The DVDFreak banner (used exclusively @ ZÓNA - the place where this all started) actually features the Baron flying leisurely on a cannon ball... And this is the 9th version of the film I've reviewed here (I had to go and update the site's "engine" to be able to include it - I never expected having more than 8 in one comparison); according to my friend and former collaborator, standa.e, an idea presents itself that concluding DVDFreak's existence (as - due to my workload - it's been slowly dying over the last few years) with reviews of the Karel Zeman Blu-ray collection would be somehow appropriate... Well, perhaps it would, but not with this particular release! :-P Verily, it does look better than its SD counterpart(s), but it's not been restored - unless you count the (automatic) scratch removal or whatchamacallit that cleaned the picture up a treat (these "improvements" were already bestowed upon the DVD - see also the "raindrops" example I provided here):

So there's lots of room for (genuine) improvement in PQ alone; the soundtrack could do with a bump up to lossless too... And I just fail to understand the parties involved stubbornly ignoring the existence of the longer cut - why not include the additional footage as an extra at least, for God's sake?! Ah, whatever - DVDFreak might "diminish, and go into the West," but the wait for the ultimate edition of Baron Munchausen is still on...

When I first became aware of this edition, I assumed, based on the presence of Spanish subtitles, it was a (legal) port of the Spanish DVD (reviewed below). Well, I was right - up to a point; after examining the disc closely, I cannot but conclude it's based on a "rip" of the Spanish DVD that's available at "certain places" on the Internet, complete with Spanish & fan-made English subtitles, since at least late 2008. To add insult to injury, the conversion from the rip (resolution 560 × 408 px) back to the DVD resolution has been done in the most amateurish way possible, as evidenced by the omnipresent pixelation / "jaggies" (in the following example, normal: a screenshot from the rip I found on the Internet (upscaled to DVD resolution using AviSynth's Lanczos4Resize), mouse over: the corresponding frame from the German DVD - requires JavaScript):

And there's more that aroused my suspicion, e.g. the DivX logo in one of the Ostalgica trailers (example on the right), or - and this put a smile on my face - the photogalleries with pictures downloaded from the Internet, many of which come from... my own reviews of the various Zeman DVDs! Following are thumbnails taken from Ostalgica's photogallery #1; by clicking them you'll get to the full-sized DVD captures in my reviews (note: to see the frame corresponding to the 6th thumbnail, move the cursor over the picture of the "burning" horse in the review of TV JOJ's version below):

(I'd hazard a guess the rest of the pictures in gallery #1 comes from here.)

"The Fabulous Baron Munchausen" shares the disc with "The Stolen Airship;"only available in "Karel Zeman Collection" 2-disc set,together with "On the Comet."

Sinister Film's encode of "The Fabulous Baron Munchausen" equals that of the older Spanish release 100 %, a fact making visual comparison superfluous (i.e. the screengrabs are bitwise identical). Thus, at the bottom of this page, you'll find only one set of screenshots representing both DVDs.

*the scenes that were never dubbed into Italianhave been left in their original language*****difference between channels is -49.55 dB (0.33 %),resp. -53.56 dB (0.21 %)***with optional Italian subtitles

OK, here goes - I've got 2 pieces of information for you: a good one & a bad one. Let's stick to the tradition, and have the bad one first - the Spanish DVD edition of "The Fabulous Baron Munchausen" is the same cut version as seen on the Japanese disc (for details, have a look at the missing scene index below). And now for the good one - Track Media's transfer looks just great! It's much, much sharper, shows a little more picture on all four sides in most scenes (while showing less at the bottom in a few), the blacks are deeper, and the contrast seems better to me as well. On the other hand, the colours appear to be slightly muted, or - as the case might be - Broadway's are oversaturated, but who knows...?

This is a recording from TV JOJ's digital satellite broadcast. I started comparing it with the Japanese DVD just out of curiosity, however, interestingly enough, I noticed that the colours & framing are not the same as on the DVD, and what's more, the Japanese print is missing approximately 6 minutes** of footage! I'll try to summarize the missing scenes one of these days, and will update this review afterwards.

Here's the update: I compared the 2 versions scene by scene, and the result is - the Japanese release omits 27 scenes! Following is a "list" of these scenes (mouse over the images to see the number of frames missing @ the given time):

Moreover, another 2 scenes were replaced with different footage. The first featured a "burning" horse, and has been replaced with a previously used scene of "smoke over the town" (mouse over the image to see the other scene - requires JavaScript):

The second scene - "a boat in the bay" - was just swapped with a footage of "a different boat in the bay" (mouse over the image to see the other scene - requires JavaScript):